1 The First Murder?

Sindy Parry was Cosette’s very first murder, though at the time, Cosette didn’t know it. None of us did.

Perhaps we should have known. I’m not making excuses for her, but she had arrived in the United States so recently the one suitcase with her makeup kit was still somewhere between Geneva’s Cointrin and New York’s Kennedy. She’d arrived so recently she hadn’t even had time to replace the guns she had to leave behind in Switzerland.

As far as the victim was concerned, the only Americans Cosette knew were us - the members of the Residue Class. She certainly didn’t know a Sindy Elayna Parry. in The Village or anywhere else.

Cosette had been in New York City no more than one hour in her life. That couldn’t have been enough time to travel from Kennedy to The Village, shoot Ms. Parry in the skull, and return to the airport to meet us for her ride to Hurlsburg. Heck, she didn’t even know what “The Village” was, let alone where it was.

On the ride to Hurlsburg, of course, we informed her that The Village was Greenwich Village. Later, she had the opportunity to experience several murders there, but for the first two months of her new life in America, she knew nothing of the Death Lottery. Neither did we, not at the time Cosette arrived.

The murder of Sindy Elayna Parry had of course been covered in all the New York papers. Sindy had expired the same day we met Cosette’s Swissair flight from Geneva, but until a few weeks later, all Cosette read were the “apartments for rent” classifieds. Even if she had been reading the news, Sindy’s death wasn’t sufficiently sensational to hold reader attention for more than two editions.

All that naturally changed when reporters realized Sindy’s slaying was but the first of a long series.